/lit/ - Literature

>>15690584
Was it autism bros?

>>15690606
What do you think?

>>15690606
What, the rabid individualists?

>>15690584
Now copypasta what he wrote about lefty's

>>15690584
sounds alright. Might have to give his stuff a read and that

>>15690656
>>15690635
Here’s the book

>>15690674
I'll post it I guess

>Liberalism wants to give me what is mine, but it thinks to procure it for me not under the title of mine, but under that of the “human.” As if it were attainable under this mask! The rights of man, the precious work of the Revolution, have the meaning that the Man in me entitles [Literally, furnishes me with a right] me to this and that; I as individual, i.e. as this man, am not entitled, but Man has the right and entitles me. Hence as man I may well be entitled; but, as I am more than man, to wit, a special man, it may be refused to this very me, the special one. If on the other hand you insist on the value of your gifts, keep up their price, do not let yourselves be forced to sell out below price, do not let yourselves be talked into the idea that your ware is not worth its price. do not make yourself ridiculous by a “ridiculous price,” but imitate the brave man who says, I will sell my life (property) dear, the enemy shall not have it at a cheap bargain; then you have recognized the reverse of Communism as the correct thing, and the word then is not “Give up your property!” but “Get the value out of your property!”

>>15690779
Wow. Is that Jordan Peterson? Sign me up!

>>15690635
1.3.2 Social Liberalism
We are freeborn human beings and wherever we look we see ourselves made into servants of egoists! Shall we therefore also become egoists? Heaven forbid! We would prefer to make egoists impossible! We want to make them all into “paupers”; all will have nothing, so that “all may have.”

—So say the socialists[131].

Who is this person that you call “all”?—It is “society”!—But then is it a bodily being?—We are its body!—You all[132]? You all are not yourselves a body—you, mister, are certainly a bodily being; you too, madam, and you; but you all together are only bodies, not a body. Therefore, society would certainly have bodies at its service, but not any body of its own. Like the “nation” of the politicians, it will turn out to be nothing but a “spirit,” its body only a sham.

In political liberalism, human freedom is freedom from persons, from personal rule, from the master; the safeguarding of each individual person against other persons, personal freedom.

No one has any orders to give; the law alone gives orders.

But though the persons have become equal, their possessions still haven’t. And the poor person still needs the rich person, the rich person still needs the poor person: the former needs the rich person’s money, as the latter needs the poor person’s work. So no one needs the other as a person, but rather he needs him as a giver, thus as one who has something to give, as holder or possessor. So what he has, makes the Man. And in having, or in “possessions,” people are not equal.

Consequently, social liberalism concludes that no one must have, as according to political liberalism no one was supposed to give orders; in other words, as in that instance the state alone got the command, so now society alone gets the possessions.

>>15691119
By protecting each one’s person and property against the other, the state separates them from one another; each is his part for himself and has his part for himself. The one for whom what he is and has is enough, finds this state of things to be worth his while; but one who wants to be and have more looks around for this more, and finds it in the power of other persons. Here he comes upon a contradiction: as a person no one takes second place to another, and yet one person has what another doesn’t have but would like to have. So he concludes that the one person is more than the other, because the former has what he needs, and the latter doesn’t have it; the former is a rich person, the latter is a poor person.

Now he asks himself further, should we let what we rightly buried come back to life again, should we let this inequality that was restored in a roundabout way hold? No, on the contrary, we must thoroughly bring to an end what was only half accomplished. Our freedom from another’s person still lacks the freedom from the things the other’s person can command, from the things he has in his personal power, in short, from “personal property.” So let’s do away with personal property. Let no one have anything anymore, let everyone be a—pauper. Let property be impersonal, let it belong to —society.

Before the supreme ruler, the sole commander, we had all become equal, equal persons, i.e., zeros.

Before the supreme proprietor we all become equal—paupers. For now, one is still in another’s estimation a “pauper,” a “have-not”; but then this estimation ceases. We are all paupers, and as the overall mass of communist society we could call ourselves “ragged rabble.”

When the proletarian will have actually established his intended “society” where the gap between rich and poor is to be eliminated, then he’ll be a pauper, because then he’ll think it’s something to be a pauper, and might raise “pauper” up enough to be an honorable form of address, as the revolution did with the word “citizen.” Pauper is his ideal; we are all to become paupers.

>>15691132
This is the second robbery of the “personal” in the interest of “humanity.” Neither command nor property is left to the individual; the state took the former, society the latter.

Because in society, the most oppressive evils make themselves felt to the oppressed in particular, and so the members of the lower regions of society think they’ve found the fault in society, and make it their task to discover the right society. It’s just the old phenomenon, that one first seeks the fault in everything but oneself thus, in the state, in the self-seeking of the rich, etc., who, nonetheless, have our fault to thank for their existence.

The reflections and conclusions of communism look very simple. As things lie at this time, under current state relations, some, and they are the majority, stand at a disadvantage to others, the minority. In this state of affairs that latter are in a state of prosperity, and the former in a state of need. Thus, the present state of affairs, the state itself, must be done away with. And what in its place? Instead of scattered prosperity—a general prosperity, a prosperity for all.

Through the revolution, the bourgeoisie became almighty, and all inequality was abolished by raising or lowering everyone to the dignity of a bourgeois citizen: the common man—raised, the aristocrat, lowered; the third estate became the sole estate, namely, the estate of—state citizens. Now communism replies: Our dignity and our essence do not consist in our all being—the equal children of our mother, the state, all born with an equal claim to her love and protection, but in all of us being for each other. This is our equality or in this we are the same, that I as well as you and all of you, are active and working for each other; thus in that each of us is a worker. In this, what matters is not what we are for the state, namely citizens, thus not our bourgeois citizenship, but what we are for each other, that each of us only exists through the other, who, since he takes care of my needs, at the same time sees his own satisfied by me. He works, for example, for my clothing (tailor), I for his amusement (comedy-writer, rope-dancer), he for my food (farmer), I for his instruction (scholar, etc.). So our being of the working class is our dignity and our—equality.

>>15691145
What advantage does being of the middle classes[133] bring us? Burdens![134] And how highly is our work estimated? As low as possible! But all the same, work is our sole value: the best thing about us is that we are workers, that is our meaning in the world; and this is why it must also become our advantage and show itself to advantage. What can you show us as an alternative? Surely only—work as well. Only for work or services do we owe you a recompense, not for your mere existence; also not for what you are for yourselves, but only for what you are for us. How do you have claims on us? Perhaps through your high birth, etc.? No, only by what you do that is desirable or useful to us. So then let it be this way: We are willing to be worth to you only so much as we do for you, but you are to be held likewise by us. Services determine worth, those services that are worth something to us, thus, the work for each other, the work for the common good. Let each one be in the other’s eyes a worker. The one who does something useful is second to none, or—all workers (workers, of course, in the sense of workers “for the common good,” i.e., communistic workers) are equal. But, since the worker is worthy of his hire,[135] let wages be equal too.

>>15691153
As long as faith was enough for the honor and dignity of human beings, no objection could be made against any work, however strenuous, if it only did not hinder a person in his faith. However, now that everyone is supposed to develop himself into a human being, relegating human beings to machine-like work amounts to the same thing as slavery. If a factory worker has to make himself dead tired for twelve hours and more, he is kept from becoming a human being. All work should have the aim of satisfying the person. Therefore, he must also become a master in it, i.e., be able to create it as a totality. One who only puts on the heads, only draws the wire, etc., in a pin factory, works mechanically, like a machine; he remains a dabbler, doesn’t become a master; his work cannot satisfy him, it can only tire him out. Taken for itself, his work is nothing, has no purpose in itself is nothing complete in itself; he only works into another’s hand, and is used (exploited) by this other. For this worker in another’s service there is no enjoyment of a cultivated spirit, at most, crude amusements; indeed, culture is closed off to him. To be a good Christian, one needs only to believe, and that can be done under the most oppressive conditions. Thus, the Christian-minded are only concerned with the piety of the oppressed workers, their patience, submission, etc. The downtrodden classes could endure all their miseries only so long as they were Christians; because Christianity does not let their grumbling and their outrage arise. Now the pacifying of desires is no longer enough, but their satiation is demanded. The bourgeoisie has proclaimed the gospel of the enjoyment of the world, of material enjoyment, and is now surprised that this doctrine finds adherents among us poor people; it has shown that not faith and poverty, but culture and possessions, make one blessed; we proletarians also understand this.

>>15691166
The bourgeoisie liberated us from the command and arbitrariness of individuals. But the arbitrariness that springs from the conjuncture of conditions, and which could be called the contingency of circumstances, remained; favoring fortune and those “favored by fortune” still remain.

For example, when a branch of industry goes under and thousands of workers lose their livelihood, people are fair-minded enough to acknowledge that the individual isn’t to blame, but that “the evil lies in the conditions.”

Let’s change the conditions then, but let’s change them thoroughly, and in such a way that their contingency becomes powerless and a law! Let us no longer be slaves of chance! Let’s create a new order that puts an end to fluctuations. Then let this order be sacred!

Earlier one had to please the lords to come to something; after the revolution the word was “grab fortune!” Fortune-hunting or games of chance: bourgeois life began in this. Along with that then, the requirement that anyone who gains something doesn’t recklessly put it at stake again.

>>15691183
A strange and yet utterly natural contradiction. Competition, in which bourgeois or political life solely operates, is a game of chance through and through, from stock market speculation all the way down to applications for official positions, the hunt for customers, the job search, the pursuit of promotions and decorations, the rummaging of the haggling junkman, etc. If one succeeds in pushing out and outbidding his rivals, then the “lucky throw” is made; because it must already be taken as a stroke of luck that the winner feels himself gifted with an ability, even if cultivated with the most careful diligence, against which the others don’t know how to rise, so that—none more gifted are found. And now those who pursue their daily lives in the midst of these changing fortunes without doing badly from it are seized with the most moral indignation when their own principle appears in its most naked form and “wreaks misfortune” as—a game of chance. The game of chance is just too clear, too unveiled a competition, and, like any definite nakedness, offends the honorable sense of shame.

The socialists want to put an end to this activity of chance,[136] and to form a society in which people are not longer dependent on fortune, but free.

>>15691190
In the most natural way this aspiration expresses itself first as hatred of the “unfortunate” toward the “fortunate,” i.e., of those for whom fortune has done little or nothing toward those for whom it has done everything.

But actually the resentment is not aimed at the fortunate, but at fortune, this rotten spot of the bourgeoisie.

Since the communists first declare free activity as the human essence, they, like all work-day ways of thinking, need a Sunday; like all material aspirations, they need a God, an uplifting[137] and edification alongside their mindless[138] “work.”

That the communist sees the human being, the brother, in you is only the Sunday side of communism. According to the workday side, he doesn’t by any means take you as a human being as such, but as a human worker, as a working person. The liberal principle is there in the first view; illiberality is hidden in the second. If you were a “lazybones,” he would certainly not fail to recognize the human being in you, but would strive to cleanse it, as a “lazy human being,” from laziness, and to convert you to the faith that work is the human being’s “destiny and calling.”

>>15691196
Therefore he shows a double face: with the one he takes care that the spiritual human being is satisfied; with the other he looks around for means for the material of bodily human being. He gives the human being a twofold job, one task of material and one of spiritual acquisition.

The bourgeoisie had openly laid out spiritual and material goods, and left it to each one to reach out for them if he wanted to.

Communism actually provides them to each one, imposes them on him, and forces him to acquire them. It takes seriously the idea that, because only spiritual and material goods make us human beings, we must acquire these goods without protest in order to be a human being. The bourgeoisie made acquisition open; communism forces acquisition, and recognizes only the acquirer, the tradesperson. It’s not enough that the trade is open, you must take it up.

So the only thing left to criticism is to show that the acquisition of these goods by no means makes us human beings.

With the liberal commandment that everyone should make a human being of himself, or make himself a human being, the need was posited that everyone must gain time for this work of humanization, i.e., that it would become possible for every one to work on himself.

>>15691203
The bourgeoisie believed it had arranged this if it gave everything human over to competition, but entitled the individual to everything human. “Each may strive after everything!”

Social liberalism finds that the matter isn’t settled with the “may”; because may means only that it is forbidden to no one, but not that it is made possible for every one. It, therefore, claims that the bourgeoisie is liberal only with the mouth and in words, highly illiberal in deed. On its part, it wants to give all of the means to be able to work on ourselves.

The principle of fortune or competition is certainly outdone by the principle of work. But at the same time the worker, in his awareness that the essential thing about him is “the worker,” keeps himself away from egoism and submits to the supremacy of a workers’ society, as the bourgeois citizen clung with devotion to the competition-state. The lovely dream of “social duty” is still being dreamed. People think again that society gives what we need, and we are therefore obligated to it, owe it everything.[139] They still remain at the point of wanting to serve a “supreme giver of all good.” That society is no I at all, which could give, lend, or grant, but an instrument or means from which we might draw benefit; that we have no social obligations, but merely interests in pursuit of which society has to serve us; that we owe society no sacrifice, but if we sacrifice anything, sacrifice it to ourselves: the socialists don’t think about this, because they—as liberals—are trapped in the religious principle and zealously strive after—a sacred society, as the state was up to now.

Society, from which we have everything, is a new master, a new phantasm, a new “supreme being,” which “takes us into its service and duty”!

A more detailed assessment of political as well as social liberalism can only find its place further on. For now we skip this in order to bring them before the tribunal of humane or critical liberalism.

>>15690779
hahaha this is a funny take that Stirner would mostly approve of if the conclusion were not inane babble